Challenges and alternatives in building a Secure Information Sharing Environment through a community-driven Cross Domain infrastructure

Abstract

The challenges of building a Secure Information Sharing Environment are based on increased need to share data across agencies and security domains. The need has grown to also include sharing secure data with allied and coalition forces while protecting specific key parts of the information due to legal and ethical issues. There is an increasing need to automate the process where data is sanitized and shared in a seamless manner to empower our warfighters and commercial entities to increase the security and enhance services to the community. The obstacle is that information is generally stored flat files in multiple security domains and there are laws that prohibits sharing the whole data, but allows access to the majority of items. The task of architecting systems that enables Cross Domain (CD) capabilities is a significant undertaking that requires an understanding of data systems, technologies, governance, and cultures. The UCDMO is charged with analyzing the DoD/IC community needs, the current technologies and the future technologies that are at various phases of development to facilitate Assured Information Sharing (AIS) goals. The long term goal is to build a SOA based Enterprise that enables the community to use the diverse resources across various domains to deliver the information to the intended destination.